AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE: GRAFJAMMER AND WRANG — “KOUDE GRACHT / GRAMME WERF”

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Mar 152019
 

 

I wonder what’s in the water in Utrecht, or whether the taps only stream some combination of alcohol and paint stripper. I wonder whether it will be possible to play this 7″ vinyl more than once, or whether it will simply ignite and melt down on the first spin. I wonder whether there’s any way I can teleport into Utrecht the next time Grafjammer and Wrang take the stage to destroy some local venue. Questions, questions, so many questions.

Any questions, or any other thoughts, will only come after listening to this new split we’re premiering today. While the songs are streaming, it’s hard to think at all. The music on these two tracks is such a wild, raucous, riotous experience, so full of blazing carnal vigor and blood-lusting ferocity, so supercharged with neck-wrecking rhythms and contagious riffs, that pumping your head like a piston or picturing yourself careening into other human beings in some sweat-soaked mosh pit become the immediate instinctive reactions. There’s no room left for rational thought.

The two bands on this split, Grafjammer and Wrang, are indeed both located in Utrecht, that ancient city in the center of the Netherlands. They share a drummer, and also a strong taste for sordid, filthy black metal. They recorded these two songs in a live setting at dB’s, which seems to be a combination bar, music venue, and practice space, and the energy of a live performance certainly emanates from these recordings. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THESE BEASTS — “SHIRILLA IN A TUB”

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Mar 142019
 

 

The members of Chicago-based These Beasts have a friend named Greg Shirilla. They say he loves a good bath. When the band worked out the song you’re about to hear in a practice-night jam session, they named it “Shirilla in a Tub“, as a kind of placeholder for something else that would be developed after the lyrics were written. As the band have told us, the song “actually has nothing to do with Greg, but we tend to give songs names before the lyrics are written and sometimes those names just stick”.

The name obviously stuck here. Funny name. But there’s nothing funny about the music. It will tear you a new one, and won’t apologize for doing so. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SÜHNOPFER — “L’HOIRIE DE MES ANCESTRES”

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Mar 142019
 

 

It might be a good idea for you to take many deep breaths before you begin listening to the song we’re streaming below — because for more than 10 minutes you’ll be breathless. Eye drops wouldn’t be a bad idea either, because the music is also capable of leaving a listener wide-eyed and unblinking for just as long.

The song in question is “L’Hoirie de mes Ancestres“, and it comes from the stunning new album by the French black metal band Sühnopfer, which is the sole creation of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ardraos. Entitled Hic Regnant Borbonii Manes, it will be released on May 10th by by Debemur Morti Productions, which describes the music (quite accurately) as an amalgamation of “regal Bourbon madness with quintessential black metal fury”. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AMONG VULTURES — “COFFIN OF THE UNIVERSE”

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Mar 132019
 

 

After 20 years and more than 300 live performances operating under the name Attack Vertical, the Swiss quintet who are the subject of this premiere began 2019 by adopting a new name — Among Vultures — and readying the release of a new album which shares that name. It will hit the streets on March 29th via Tenacity Music, and today we’re presenting a video for the record’s hard-hitting opening track, “Coffin Of The Universe“.

Over those two decades of work, the music of Among Vultures has evolved, now manifesting itself as a ferocious amalgam of hardcore and death metal that’s bruising, battering, and guaranteed to put a high-voltage charge straight down your spine. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TOTALITARIAN — “LIBERATORS”

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Mar 122019
 

 

Between about 1930 and 1945, in an area of Europe that included eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic republics, approximately 14 million innocent people were shot, gassed, or intentionally starved to death. As if in the most grotesque competition imaginable, Stalin and Hitler shared responsibility for the mass slaughter, and more than half of it occurred outside the Nazi gas chambers and death camps, often in more obscure circumstances, in villages and the countryside. Both Jews and non-Jews were shot to death by the millions, simply penned like animals and deprived of food, or otherwise forced into famine. The scale is unimaginable; in Belarus alone, one quarter of its population were killed as a result of the convergence of these two brutal, totalitarian regimes.

The details of these mass  exterminations were gathered together by Yale historian Timothy Snyder in a well-reviewed and award-winning 2010 book named Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. To write it, he assembled an enormous mass of fresh research on Soviet and Nazi murder, much of it emerging from archives once sealed behind the Iron Curtain, and some of it his own, in order to produce, as one reviewer put it, “something like a final and definitive account” of these terrors. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PUTREVORE AND GRIM FATE

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Mar 122019
 

 

The corroded iron gates of a cavernous stinking crypt have been wrenched open, releasing into our world a hideous spectacle of shambling ghouls and hungering horrors, revealing visions of suppurating decay and blood-lusting mayhem. Ancient avatars of death metal darkness have been given new life again, and this time we have Putrevore and Grim Fate to thank for a renewal of our odious pleasures.

The first of those names has been reverberating in the dank caverns of the underground for more than a decade, combining the talents of people whose fame is older still, while the second name is new but destined to spread quickly by word of mouth. They have joined forces in a new 7″ split release that Dawnbreed Records and Seed of Doom Records will discharge on March 15th, and it would be hard to think of a better gift on the Ides of March for addicts of monstrous death metal. You’ll discover that for yourselves right now, because we have a stream of both tracks below. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASHEN HORDE — “PARITY LOST”

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Mar 082019
 

 

The last time we featured the music of Ashen Horde in these pages was almost exactly two years ago when we premiered the band’s two-track EP, The Alchemist, which was intended to pave the way to the band’s third album. Now, that album has been completed, with the title of Fallen Cathedrals — and today we’re hosting another Ashen Horde premiere, a breathtaking track off that new record named “Parity Lost“.

For those who might be encountering Ashen Horde for the first time, it began as the solo project of Los Angeles-based musician Trevor Portz. Working alone, he released a handful of EPs and two albums since 2013. Beginning with The Alchemist, he joined forces with vocalist Stevie Boiser, known for his work with such tech-death heavyweights as Vale of Pnath, Inferi, and Equipoise, and both are in harness again for Fallen Cathedrals. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OBSCURING VEIL — “DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE KNIFE I USED?”

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Mar 082019
 

 

Consider these names, and try to imagine what might happen if they joined forces in a musical enterprise devoted to channeling their own creative madness and simultaneously assaulting the sanity of their listeners:

Matron Thorn (Ævangelist, Præternatura, Benighted In Sodom, Devil Worshipper, ex-Bethlehem)
H.V. Lyngdal (Wormlust, Guðveiki, Martröð)
Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak Of Altering, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating)
Jarle Byberg (Urgehal, ex-Craft, ex-Shining)
Kabukimono

This isn’t an idle thought exercise. These individuals have in fact collaborated under the name Obscuring Veil, and their first album, Fleshvoid To Naught, will be released on March 22nd by I, Voidhanger Records. We are fiendishly pleased to present a stream of a track that asks the question “Do You Want To See The Knife I Used?“ Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CHALICE OF SUFFERING — “LOST ETERNALLY”

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Mar 072019
 

 

Much like the vistas of fog-shrouded trees and snow-cloaked mountains you’ll see in the video we’re presenting for the title track to the new Chalice of Suffering album, the music is itself cold, bleak, and yet wondrous, even in the near-abyssal depths of its loneliness and despair. Like those same visions, “Lost Eternally” is hypnotic and haunting, yet possessed of a craggy, mountainous weight, and its emotional resonance of misery is also staggering.

The seven-track album that shares the song’s name will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records on April 19th, and it makes for a supremely powerful follow-up to this Minnesota funeral doom band’s 2016 debut album, For You I Die. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DOOMBRINGER — “WALPURGIS FIRES”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Mar 062019
 

 

Everything about Doombringer’s new album Walpurgis Fires is sorcerous. One imagines hooded warlocks reciting conjurations over a smoking cauldron, transmuting a host of musical ingredients into a strange new potion that’s both intoxicating and poisonous. A metal musicologist would have a fine old time attempting to reverse-engineer what they’ve done and trying to document the formula, and we’ll do a bit of that here because their concoction is so unusually inventive.

But such a dissection would only go so far in explaining why the album is such a heady (and unnerving) experience; there is no good substitute for simply listening to it — which we’re giving you the opportunity to do today in advance of the album’s release tomorrow (March 7th) by Nuclear War Now! Productions. Continue reading »

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